SEVERANCE PAYOUTS TO FIRED CITY OFFICIALS ALMOST $400,000

Former city manager, chief financial officer got six months’ salary, accrued leave time

Former City Manager Bob Johnson and former Chief Financial Officer Genie Wilson received almost $400,000 in severance payouts as part of their respective employment agreements, according to city documents received via a public records request.

The total for Johnson, who was fired less than a year after he took over the city’s top job Jan. 1, 2012, was $203,835. That included six months’ salary as severance and accrued leave time, according to Interim City Manager Aaron Adams.

The payout for Wilson, who was fired around the same time as Johnson in November, was $175,704, which also included six months’ salary as severance and accrued leave time, Adams reported.

During last week’s council meeting, the council approved adjusting the budgets for the city manager’s office and the finance department to account for those expenditures.

Looking forward, Mayor Mike Naggar said Friday that he plans in the next month or so to ask for the council to consider naming Interim City Manager Aaron Adams as the city manager.

“That’s where we’re at,” he said. “We’re not going to skip a beat.”

In the 2012-13 budget adopted last year, the budget for the city’s manager’s department was projected to be around $1.6 million. The revised budget presented to the council last week put the new total at $1.66 million, about a 4 percent boost. In 2011-12, the budget for the city manager’s department was $1.52 million.

The department now includes four positions — city manager, executive assistant, senior management analyst and adviser to city manager — but the adviser position is expected to be dropped in about a year when the city has finished paying off the accrued leave and “seniority pay” for former City Manager Shawn Nelson, who left the city at the end of 2011 after 21 years of service.

During Nelson’s administration, the city employed two assistant managers, Johnson and Adams, and a deputy city manager, Grant Yates. Yates left the city in October 2012 to take the city manager position in Lake Elsinore.

Naggar said that four-pronged attack was wildly successful during the boom times of the mid-2000s, which saw the city transformed by new housing and commercial development.

“We kicked butt for 10 years,” he said.

When the economy cratered in 2008, Nelson’s office responded by cutting the budget and left numerous positions unfilled. In the summer of 2010, the Los Angeles Times’ investigation into the abuses in the charter city of Bell focused attention on city manager salaries statewide.

The resulting outcry made the $300,000-plus salary for Nelson, and the salaries of his assistants and deputy managers, campaign fodder in the 2010 council election that saw council members Ron Roberts, Jeff Comerchero and Maryann Edwards retain their seats.

In 2011, with the economy still relatively stagnant, Nelson announced he was retiring and the council decided to hire Johnson to take over the department in 2012, starting him at a salary of $215,000.

“The economy caused us to scale back,” Naggar said.

Johnson moved Adams to director of the Community Services Department, filling a role that had been held for years by Herman Parker, and moved Yates into a sort of spokesman position.

In the budget adjustment approved last week, that position was changed to an assistant city manager position.

If Adams is named city manager later this year, Naggar said he expects there will be a recruitment process to fill the assistant position.

Adams, who recently received a raise that boosted his salary to $192,000 a year, said in an email to The U-T Californian that the assistant manager position is and will remain unfilled until it can be considered in the context of next year’s operating budget beginning July 1.

He said the city has 157 authorized positions and he expects four will remain vacant through the end of the fiscal year: office specialist and recreation supervisor for the YMCA, assistant city manager and management analyst in public works.

The two positions for the YMCA building were created to pay the salaries of employees who were going to work in that facility at Margarita Community Park, which was going to be another recreation center for the city. But the city did not end up buying it from the YMCA of Riverside City and County because of repair issues with the building.

The city could move to take over the building by ruling that the Y defaulted on its lease agreement by not maintaining the building — the land for the structure was leased from the city for a $1 a year — but the council has not yet decided on a course of action.